The BITSw.d informat
extracts particular bits from an input stream and assigns the numeric
equivalent of the extracted bit string to a variable. Together, the w and d values specify the location of the string that you want to read.
This informat is useful
for extracting data from system records that have many pieces of information
packed into single bytes.
1The EBCDIC binary code
for a capital B is 11000010, and the ASCII binary code is 01000010.
The input pointer moves
to column 2 (d=1). Then the
INPUT statement reads four bits (w=4) which is the bit string 1000 and stores the numeric value 8,
which is equivalent to this binary combination.